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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

For French speakers, a talk yesterday from Didier Raoult who is also testing Chloroquine in France [1] (and I believe who originally discovered the anti-viral benefits of that molecule on certain viruses). He finds that it reduces significantly the viral charge.

He made an interesting point. It appears infected people remain contagious for 3 weeks. Taking this drug allows to significantly reduce this period. The current advice for people who are sick is stay at home and only show up at an hospital if you start having respiratory problems. He thinks a better approach is to get them to get tested quickly, and take a combination of anti-viral drugs. This will likely result in less contagions.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4J8kydOvbc

[edit] Adding slides link posted by chmike on this page: https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

[edit] corrected contagiousness from 4 weeks to 3 weeks.

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Dr Raoult reports that after 6 days of treatment with Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine) only 25% were still carrying the virus. Without treatment, 80% were still carrying the virus after 6 days. This result should be published soon.

But does that mean anything? Without hydroxychloroquine, how many people stop shedding active virus because the immune system starts to respond by day 6 of symptoms? It seems to be about the same.

The comment you reply to says that.

People carry it for up to five weeks.

For non French speakers, Youtube will translate the subtitles to the language of your choice if you click settings a bit

I must admit as an immune supressed individual - if (uk) they might suggest prophylactic meds for us.

that would make sense:

test everybody, if positive take the drug for 5 days, rest for 2 more and back to work you go. a win for everybody!

Because testing everybody is no big deal.

According to Raoult, it doesn’t seem to be a technical limitation, the test is a standard procedure that labs around the country already do routinely for other viruses.

It's the capacity that is the issue. Testing labs all over the world, are running far above capacity already. It's not something that can be scaled up overnight either.

South Korea managed to spin a system where they can test 20k people a day in just over two weeks[1]. What's stopping other countries from doing that?

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-51836898

Wasn’t there a $1 test being proposed? You can start by testing people with high temperature at the entrance of buildings and metro. Still cheaper that closing schools and all the rest of the economy.

Proposed, yes, but you can't buy it yet. Also, the cheaper tests so far are all antibody tests, not the more accurate RNA tests that everyone is clamoring for. Antibody tests don't work until you have had the infection for a while.

And they are even worse at telling you when you're "all clear" (if they can do it at all, many antibody tests are a "once positive, always positive" deal).

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